


Lost At Sea

by Jayne L (JayneL)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Tag, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 16:10:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/915276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayneL/pseuds/Jayne%20L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I thought you'd want to know," Dean finishes, "since you're family."</p>
<p>Coda to 8.19.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost At Sea

Dean thinks as he drives that maybe she closed up shop and left. If so, he won't blame her: her place is a crime scene. They'd cleaned up the blood, but that didn't mean it wasn't still there.

But when he rounds the last bend through the trees, foot easing down on the brake over the worn ruts of the packed-dirt lane, the ramshackle little diner's glowing warmly ahead, light spilling out from the windows and screen door and diffusing through the misty evening. There's a truck parked out front; a man Dean assumes is its owner is visible inside, sitting at the counter with his shoulders hunched. And there, behind the counter, is Elizabeth, standing by the register with her hair tied up and her head tilted down, hands busy with--something.

Dean shuts off the Impala's engine and hears music playing inside, fuzzy radio signal filtered through tinny speakers, slow-picked guitar and a low croon. He sits and listens for a bit before swiping his sweaty palms on his thighs and opening the car door.

The tread of his boots on the porch's floorboards raises Elizabeth's head, a welcoming smile plucking up the corners of her mouth; when he steps into the light, they fall. She shuffles a stack of receipts between her long, thin fingers. "Have a seat, hon," she calls, easy, her glance darting to the customer at the counter before fixing again on Dean. "I'll be with you in a sec."

He sits at a creaky table by the wall where the customer won't be able to get a good look at him when he leaves. A minute later, Elizabeth wordlessly delivers black coffee and a syrupy wedge of the best pecan pie Dean's ever tasted.

* * *

Dean's nursing the dregs of his second cup of coffee when the customer finally leaves, feet scraping down the steps, truck engine wheezing painfully before turning over. As the noise of the old junker fades into the distance, Elizabeth comes out from behind the counter and turns the sign hung inside the screen, closes and locks the door, turns off the overhead lights and the radio. Turns to Dean and holds up a bottle of bourbon.

They sit at the counter, at the fuzzy edge of the yellow glow from the lamps still on low above the cooktops. Elizabeth puts two glasses on the countertop and pours generous fingers into each. "Nobody's come asking after--that man," she says, and her voice is even despite the catch in her words. Her hands are businesslike. Dean can feel her watching him even as she keeps her gaze lowered.

"Most hunters don't really have people to show up after the fact." He lifts the glass she nudges his way, tilts it back towards her for a beat in thanks. "The ones that do, they're mostly other hunters. Martin, though--" Elizabeth's fingers tighten around her glass. Dean pauses with his just under his mouth and takes in a breath of rich vapour. "I don't think you have to worry."

She nods. Lifts her own glass, and swallows. Looks up at him finally, square and steady. "You're here about Roy, then."

Dean tells her. No specifics; an abbreviation. Benny's willingness to go, and decision to stay. "I thought you'd want to know," he finishes, "since you're family."

Elizabeth ducks her head, her lips twisting fleetingly into and out of a wry smile. She'd listened attentively; a little too alert, Dean had thought, to every time he'd halted at the edge of saying something she didn't need to know. She picks up the bottle and pours again, splashing a bit more into his glass than into her own. "Back around the turn of the last century," she tells him, and there's a wry note in her voice, too, under its soft sympathy, "there was a shrimping boat went down in a squall off the coast. All hands lost. Hit the parish hard, 'cause the local men crewing that boat were all seasoned at the job and knew their way around rough water. By all rights, there should've been some survivors to tell what happened. But there weren't." She cuts him a look from under her lashes, clear-eyed and challenging. "Parish records say my mama's daddy's daddy was on that crew. Benjamin Royal Delacroix Lafitte. Lost at sea."

Dean can picture it, with a little haphazard imagination: Benny on a trawler in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, staggering against the gusts and swells of one hell of a storm. Yanked overboard when his foot tangled in the nets, maybe, or carried off by a wave swamping the deck. Lost at sea.

"That's not what really happened," he says.

Elizabeth nods, her mouth twisting again into that mystifying smile. "I figured as much."

* * *

"He talked about you," she says, standing over the sink with her hands deep in an iron kettle, scrubbing hard.

She'd risen from her stool beside Dean's at the counter after taking her third share of bourbon, waved him back down when he'd moved to stand as well. "I'm not chasin' you off," she'd said, "just gotta clean up. Have another drink." She'd put another slice of pie in front of him, too--peach this time, sunny and flaky-crusted--and Dean had subsided gratefully, settled back down and picked up his fork.

Now he looks at the strong, slim shape of her back, the shift and bunch of muscles at her shoulders as she puts some elbow grease into the kettle. He'd offered to help when he finished his pie, but she'd waved that off with a smile, too. "He did, huh?"

"I think it was you, anyway. The man who helped him come home." She pauses, and Dean thinks she's going to turn around; instead, she lifts one dripping hand out of the sink and swipes the back of her wrist across her forehead, sweeping at wisps of hair come loose from her tied-back knot. Then her hand goes right back into the suds and picks up where it left off. "He said that when he met this man, when he first laid eyes on him, it was like all at once he remembered what it was like to live. Not just survive, but _live_." She hefts the kettle out of the basin, rinses it with fresh water from the tap, tips it out. Dean is mesmerised by the easy routine of her movements, her low voice, the casual rhythm of her words. What she's saying. "I used to think he'd been in some kinda warzone. Or, he let me think it, I guess." The kettle lands upside-down on a sturdy drying rack, and now she turns, planting one damp hand on her hip and pinning him with her gaze. "Where were you really?"

Her bluntness catches Dean off-guard. He stares back at her for a second before glancing down, away, the back of his neck prickling with her attention. He picks up the bottle and rolls the bourbon around the sides a little to give himself a reason for not looking at her. He doesn't pour. "Some kinda warzone."

"Oh." She doesn't sound put off, though, or confused, or embarrassed. It's just a sound she makes, an acknowledgement, before she turns around again and reaches back into the sink to drain the dirty water. "It was you, though, yeah? You helped him get home?"

Dean's hands echo with the feel of gripping his machete, the resonance of the blow. The slight, passing resistance of bone as he severed Benny's head from his body. "Yeah, I did."

* * *

There's less than a third of the bottle still to go when Elizabeth comes around the counter and kisses him, licking boldly into his mouth as if chasing a taste of peaches. She smells like a long day of work: Cajun comfort food and sweat, the barest sweet hint of worn-off perfume. She tastes like bourbon.

She bleeds warmth through her clothes where Benny bled cool. The temperature in Purgatory was always just on the chilly side of being no temperature at all, and sometimes, if it hadn't been for the solid press of Benny's weight against him--back to back to face incoming threats, shoulder to shoulder to rest by a campfire--Dean might not have known he was there at all.

Elizabeth is warm and angular against him, not cool and burly, but the solidity is there, and familiar enough. Dean draws back and gives her a low-lidded look, a rueful half-smile. "He'd kick my ass for this."

She levels him with that gaze of hers, serious and straightforward. "He'd have no right."

They fuck against the counter, Elizabeth sitting on the edge with her long legs wrapped around Dean's hips as he rocks slowly into her. When she comes, she rolls against him like a wave, pulling him in deep and holding him there while she arches and sighs.

When Dean comes, it's with Elizabeth's mouth at his throat, a soft wet suck and a faint scrape of teeth.

* * *

She asks, "You need a place to stay tonight?"

Perched on his seat at the counter, heavy and languid and thumbing idly at paint flaking off the wood, Dean shakes his head. He hadn't liked leaving Sam in the state he was in, so soon after finishing the trial; this was supposed to be a two-day trip, max, notify and return. It's past midnight now. He's already on the verge of overstaying. "Thanks, but I gotta get back."

Elizabeth finishes tying off a bulging garbage bag and looks at him frankly, assessing. "All right. Polish off that coffee for me first, though." Reaching out, she plucks a tumbler off a shelf, fills it to the brim with water, and thunks it down in front of him. "And this."

"Yes, ma'am." Dean watches her gather her collection of trash and head out the back door with it; then, obediently, he goes to the burner and pours the tarry dregs from the pot into his cup. After one sobering sip, he opens the little fridge tucked under the counter to look for milk.

He finds a jar of dead man's blood. Smaller than a jam jar, about half-full. No label; just the look of it, thick and blackish-red, unappealing enough. Sitting in the corner of the top shelf inside the fridge door, easy to reach.

Martin's throat had been torn right open; it wouldn't have taken much to grab a jar off the counter and fill it from the spill. Maybe Martin had told her how to protect herself against vampires while they waited for Benny.

Maybe Benny had told her after Martin was dead.

By the time Elizabeth comes back inside, Dean's tossed back the jet-fuel coffee and is working through the water in long, cool swallows. If she's surprised to see him on his feet already, she doesn't let on; just goes to the sink and washes her hands, rinses the coffee pot. Turns and watches him finish his water before moving in close.

Still bleeding warmth, she lays her palm gently along his jaw. "Thanks for coming by, Dean."

He kisses her goodbye, wondering if she means it out of kindness or relief.


End file.
